Not Everyone Is A Critic, But They Damned Well SHOULD Be

Hey, All You Siskels and/or Eberts!

As a member in good standing of several communities on Google + I'm constantly amazed by what people consider to be good creative works.  Now, I'm a big proponent of the concept that every movie, game, book, comic, band and T.V. show has its own built-in audience but I also know that sometimes things just plain suck.

My dad, bless his heart, used to take me to the theater quite a bit as a little kid.  Unfortunately his taste in movies was questionable at best.  I remember, even at that discriminating young age, sitting through such diverting but sketchy dreck as The Cat from Outer Space, The Land that Time Forgot, Caveman (starring Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach!) and the truly deplorable Hangar 18.  This last one was a particularly memorable experience for two reasons:

1. After being knocked out and slung over the hero's shoulder, an anonymous goon reaches up to keep his hat on his head.  Ohhhhh...
2. Before the movie started the theater inexplicably decided to show what amounts to a modern red-band trailer for a British sex comedy.  Since the audience that day consisted mainly of hormone-addled, desperately horny pre-teen boys who had never seen boobs before, the denizens of the theater (present company included) promptly lost their shit without further ado.    

As a kid, if someone asked me about a film that I was lukewarm on I'd often say something boring and non-committal like: "Well, yeah, I guess it was alright."  Looking back on it now, I'm convinced that what I really wanted to say was "that movie sucked like a Hoover".  I think I served up these milquetoast dismissals mainly because I was too polite or lacked confidence in my own judgement.  Honestly, there's nothing wrong with saying "it blows", "it rawked" or even "it was m'eh" just so long as you can articulate your position reasonably well.  Until you can do that, then you're just kidding yourself.  

So why do we do this?  Why do we have such a hard time admitting when something is wrong and/or terrible?  Perhaps it's because we've just laid down our hard-earned money for the privilege of hearing new music, reading the latest bestseller or catching up on last week's home video releases.  Even though I firmly believe that we shouldn't pirate stuff and that artists should always get paid, sometimes I can't help but feel that, half-way through a crap movie, I've been hoodwinked somehow.  After all, a fool and their money will inevitably be parted.

My interest in formal criticism was sparked years before I read the works of John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger in University.  In fact, it all began in 1983 with the release of a little indie picture called Reveng...er...Return of the Jedi.  Now I've already recanted my troubled relationship with that flick in anal-retentive detail elsewhere (here and here for all you completest types) but a brief summation still bears repeating.

In 1983 I was totally obsessed with all things Star Wars.  I completely and utterly enthralled by the first two parts of the saga.  But after watching the final film of THE HOLY TRILOGY, I was left feeling strangely cold somehow.  It was if my best friend had been replaced by one of the Pod People from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  

I couldn't put my finger on it by I felt let down by the film somehow.  The revelations seemed ludicrous, not to mention kinda icky.  The movie looked relatively cheap and slapdash.  Compared to the modern mythos established by the first two films, the tone of Jedi felt completely juvenile and flyweight.

Since I was still completely under the thrall of Lucasfilm, I had a really hard time giving breath to my secret misgivings. If one of my friends tried to solicit my opinion about Jedi, I'd always play the apologist.  "It's good!" I'd enthuse, sounding suspiciously Stepford Wife-ish.  "I don't know if it's as good as the first two but, y'know, it's...good."

And then came that fateful day when I picked up the November 1983 issue of Starlog Magazine.  I didn't know it at the time but this historic periodical would also soon introduce me to the wild and wonderful world of Dungeons & Dragons.  But even before that happened, I bought this issue purely for noted sci-fi author Norman Spinrad's review of Return of the Jedi.  

As soon as my thirteen-year-old self was ensconced in the back seat of the family car for the return trip home I whipped open the magazine and went right for the review.  Since everything that Lucas and company had touched thus far had immediately turned to gold, I fully expected that Norman's review would act as a positive, geeky bulwark to protect my unflagging Star Wars fandom against the rising floodwaters of doubt.  But as soon as I read those first two paragraphs, I began to feel a cold chill creep over the sub-cockle region of my heart:

"I had my trepidations about reviewing Return of the Jedi and by extension, the completed Star Wars trilogy before I saw the film, and now that I have, I'm even more nervous about committing the act of lese majeste that honesty requires.  This is a dirty job but someone has to do it.

"Not to leave you in suspense, let me say at the outset that, in this reviewer's opinion, Return of the Jedi is a bad film.  It is bad on almost every possible level.  As science fiction, it is massively illogical.  As drama, it is anti-dramatic.  As action-adventure, it manages to make about two hours of almost continuous fast action and spectacular effects boring.  And as the capper to the Star Wars trilogy, it is a dreadful letdown that betrays most of what virtues the first two films in the trilogy had.

"On to the sad task of autopsy."

I was complete gobsmacked.  Over the course of four vitriolic pages, Spinrad went on to mercilessly savage the film.

At the time, I remember thinking to myself: 'Well, clearly this guy is an idiot.  He doesn't even know anything about Star Wars!'  After all, Jedi had a lot more plot then Blade Runner, which Spinrad had positively orgasmed over in a prior review.  Far from having "little or nothing to do with the rest of the film", the rescue of Han Solo served to illustrate the maturation of Luke Skywalker and his marked development as a Jedi Knight.  And never in the entire saga have the words "nuclear power" ever been uttered.       

I remembered throwing the magazine down in disgust.  If Spinrad likened his review to an autopsy then I was convinced that he should be sued for malpractice.  He even went so far as to raise the nasty specter of incest.  Incest?  In a Star Wars movie?  Seriously?  At the time I felt like a devout Muslim who'd just watched someone defile a copy of the Qur'an right in front of me.

But eventually I started to calm down and I read it again.  Yes, a lot of what Spinrad had written was ill-informed and inflammatory, but it also made me think.  The script did kinda suck.  The Luke / Leia / Han love triangle had been boringly dispensed with.  The second Death Star was a creatively bankrupt concept.  Jabba's courtiers were disgusting, the Ewoks were transparent marketing ventures and every alien looked woefully fake.  And if Lucas was aware of the relationship between Luke and Leia all along, why the hell did he let them make out with one another?  Seriously, that's just gross.

I'm telling you this because I know that it's difficult to dislodge our entrenched perspectives, even in the face of irrefutable evidence.  Slaying sacred cows often leads to irrevocable complications.  But I'm here to reassure you that it's downright imperative to do this from time to time.  Every day that goes by I grow increasingly terrified that society is getting more and more ill-informed, narrow-minded, obstinate and less discriminating.  We're far too willing to accept things at face value and embrace the mediocre.

I also know that the sort of paradigm shift that I'm proposing won't be easy since the exact same thing happened to me again as an adult back in 1999.  It took months for me to admit that The Phantom Menace makes Return of the Jedi look like friggin' Shawshank Redemption.

The moral of the story is: ask about the source of your pablum.  Take a peek behind the curtain.  Don't let your scared inner child force you to bury your head in the sand when you know full well that something is undeniably bad or terribly wrong.

EPIC REVIEW  Here it is folks, Norman Spinrad's historic diatribe against Return of the Jedi, in all its gory vitriol.  Man, talk about your Rancor monster...

(Make sure that you right-click and open each page in its own tab to read it better.) 

EPIC PLUG  You can catch my own brand of persnickety at my sister blog Entertainment Tourettes.   

THE CONSEQUENCE OF FAIL-URE  Not only will listening to our inner critic save our world, it might also cut down on some of these godawful parody movies...

  

  

       

Skool Daze : Part IV

Welcome Students of the Persistently Silly.

My fourth and final year at St.Mary's was also characterized by considerable upheaval.  The owner of our house on Lucknow opted to repossess it at the end of the year, using the giant mound of cash six students had given to him in rent money during the school year to evict us, refurbish the entire place and move in himself.

This killed us.  In the south end, we'd lived just a few minutes walk away from school.  During the summer I was forced to crawl home again to save money while a few friends of mine went hunting for a new place to live.

With a smaller pool of us committed to live together and thus share expenses, they really had to scramble to find a new place.  As it turned out, everything close to university was way too expensive.

So the following September I found myself moving into a house on Chebucto road with three other confirmed room-mates.  Speaking as someone who'd only lived in the south end for the past three years, I was really freaked out.  At the time, the new house seemed so far away from the university it might as well have been  forty-five minutes away in Truro.

They guys really didn't have much time to find anything else, so in that light, they did an admirable job.  But the house of Chebucto Road was nothing like the grand, old Victorian on Lucknow Street.

I fact we were soon to learn a disturbing story about it's genesis.  Next to the house was a block of cheap and slummy-looking flats.  Long after we'd moved in it was revealed that it was a low-rent housing complex that had become an ersatz halfway house for recovering drug addicts and people with mental disorders.  Rumor had it that the city wouldn't allow the notorious owner to construct the cheap tenements unless he lived in the neighborhood himself.

Well, good to his promise, the landlord built a home for himself across the street and moved in.


But he only lived there for a year.

Since that was always his plan, he'd built the house as quickly and cheaply as possible using the shoddiest methods and raw materials possible.

I remember being up in my room one day when I heard a crash and a friend down in the kitchen screaming for help.  I ran downstairs to see him trying to hold up an entire length of kitchen cupboards which had popped off the wall.  Cans of waxed beans and corn were sliding off the shelves and hitting him in the head.  Between the both of us we managed to gingerly pull the cupboard out of the wall and sit it on the floor until we had a chance later to mount it properly.

Turns out that the yahoos that had built the place hammered the shelves into the plaster board, missing the studs in the wall completely.  If not for the fact that we were starving students at the time who could barely afford to fill our pantries it would have fallen off the wall a lot sooner.

Our next door neighbors also proved to be a colorful lot.  One day one of our room-mates was home alone taking a shower.  He'd made the mistake of leaving the door unlocked.  When he emerged from the bathroom and turned the corner, he ran smack dab into one of the residents from next door just hanging out inside the house.  He grilled the guy as to why he was in there and all the dazed intruder could do was repeatedly ask for a smoke.

Needless to say, he was thrown out on his ass and we never made the mistake of leaving the door unlocked again.

Not that it mattered much.  One or the other scary residents who lived next door was a heinous tobacco hag who looked like Horatio Sanz in a fright wig.  Normally she was quite harmless, sitting on the step across the street with her legs splayed out like an obese cat, chain smoking all the while.  Some days when the unemployed guys I lived with spent the day tanning in lawn chairs she'd just sit there and stare holes in them.  It was gross.

One time while four of us were walking out to the car she tried to stop us and ask for a smoke, which we sometimes gave to her.  This time we were either in a rush or just didn't have any so we told her "no" and got in the car.  She promptly flew into a rage, then tried to rip the door open and crawl inside.  Everyone in the back seat started screaming like the "Simpson" kids as the car tore off, dragging her a few meters because her pudgy mitts were now wedged into the door handle.  It was terrifying.
    
Mercifully I didn't have to deal with too much of that crap since I'd met a girl that year and spent half of my time at St. Mary's living in her dorm room.  Convenience thy name is mooching! 

It was under these circumstances that I tackled my final year of university.  Mercifully most of my academic heavy lifting was done so what was left were a few mandatory courses and credits needed to graduate with a "Honors" certification.

As if that meant anything special in the long run!

Anyway, this is how things went:


HISTORY 221 - The British Isles from Earliest History to the Present

I revisited the subject of History again, this time in a course dedicated to a genuine area of interest.  For reasons that I would eventually characterize as "ancestral recall" I really had an affinity for British history, especially the medieval period.  I'd made the first stumbling efforts to write a book set partly in an historical fantasy setting and I really thought that this course would inspire me somewhat.

It certainly did but by now I was clearly becoming burnt out academically.  My essays were showing signs of creative fatigue.  Towards the end each paper I turned in began suffering from the inevitable law of diminishing returns, kinda like a scholastic version of the "Highlander" films.  Also I'd taken so many English courses that by that time I was completely stuck in "creative analysis speak" which really didn't lend itself to scholarly historic examinations.

It was also the first instance in which I turned in a essay late.  It was an overview of the Viking influence on the British Isles, a subject that I'd actually been highly interested in.  But due to unforeseen illness (shingles of all things!) the project was harshly judged after it was slid clandestinely under the prof's door a few days late.

"Generally a well written account," he begins charitably but goes on to say: "Nevertheless your paper...does not have a central question and it's arguments are derived almost entirely from your dictionary entries.  This does not qualify as research!"   Youch! 

Some of my tests also reeked of study fatigue.  Early exams were marred by "x" marks, zeros and descriptors like "confused" or "inaccurate".  A "C+" mark is further burdened with comments clearly inspired by a prof's low tolerance for bull-s#!%: "Your narrative is reasonably sound but contains a few factual errors and lacks supporting details.  You have not addressed the question."

"Stupid profs and their unreasonable expectations!" I railed. "Want me to 'address their questions' do they?  We'll I got his friggin' address right here!" (cue obscene gesture)  

I had to face facts.  I wasn't analyzing poetry and prose with my own practiced eye anymore.  I was attempting to memorize hordes of dates, names and events in the hopes of putting it all into some sort of context.  And I was failing miserably.

But I persevered and, slowly but surely, I began to see results. A paper about "The Contemporary Rogue" in English culture was returned to me christened with a solid "B".  The comments still made me bristle, since by now I was really putting my back into it.  "Your discussion raises many important issues but you rely too heavily on the language of your sources and fail to identify relevant passages.  Work on your organization!"

In Part II I talked about a certain organizational bias amongst different departments of the Faculty of Arts.  What was earning me an "A" in one class was getting me in hot water here.  In addition to my mental exhaustion I was beginning to get frustrated.

But eventually I puzzled out just what the prof wanted.  "Literacy in the Viking Age" came back with a newly-minted "A" with the comment: "Excellent!  A well-organized and well-written analysis."  Wow.  Was this the same prof?

My exams also bumped up to the "A" realm and I was back on track.  I finished off nicely with an "A+" for an assignment about "Prostitution in the Victorian Age" (Don't judge me!) which carried with it the comments: "Excellent discussion, well supported with references and examples."

It's weird that I had to struggle so much here.  Frankly I don't see a lot of difference in quality between my earlier efforts and my contributions towards the end.  I still don't get it...   

Y'know I probably would have made my life a lot easier by actually talking to some of these profs versus using my spotty-at-best psychic powers to try and puzzle out what they wanted from me.  Problem was, I often equated this to sucking up, which some students around me did with less shame than Jenna Jameson.  My reasoning is that if I couldn't let the works speak for themselves and succeed merely from it's own merit then I just didn't care.  I've never been good at toadying or boot-licking.

Probably the reason why  I now find myself at a crossroads even at this advanced stage in my life. 

I managed to salvage a "B-" out of this one by some miracle.

ENGLISH 356 to 357 - The Development of Science Fiction and Recent Science Fiction

Since most of my floor-mates were either commerce or science students, this was the only English course I ever took with a close friend in the class, which was supposed to be promising.

The guy I knew in the class....hmmmm, wait a minute.  That's too unwieldy.  I need a alias.  For the sake of anonymity what do I call him?  How about Greg?  Whoops, that's actually his real name.  Crap, I shouldn't have said that.  Okay, we'll call him Manuel.

Anyway the concept of attending a class with a buddy was supposed to be the bee's knees.  After all, you alternate going to class and always still have notes.  At least that was the theory.

Manuel had signed up for the class because he was a huge fan of things like "The Terminator", "Aliens", and  "The Twin Stars" (both the "Trek" and "Wars" flavor).  When he found out that he'd be reading early Gothic novels like "Frankenstein", cyberpunk mind-f#@% works by William Gibson and books by egg-headed scientists turned writers like Isaac Asimov he quickly lost interest.

"This entire reading list sucks," he'd gripe.

"What the f#@$ do you expect?  Did you think we'd all be sitting around discussing James Cameron's latest shooting script or debating whether or not Picard is cooler than Kirk?"

But he did help out when my old bugaboo from first year Sociology reared it's ugly head (see Part I).  My good buddy from "Early Novel" Margaret Harry betrayed my trust and demanded that we do a group presentation about J.G. Ballard's "The Terminal Beach" in the second half of the semester.  Would I be crippled by my deathly fear of public speaking and bow out again?

But I was now a different person.  I'd completed a dramatic personal arc and was much more confident by then.  I was also fortified by Manuel's considerable experience doing group presentations in the Commerce program and eventually he persuaded me to "grow the f#@$ up" and do it.

Looking at the roster of names in our group, I chuckle to myself as I recollect.  One guy pulled a "me" and didn't even show up to help with the content.  One girl's English was so bad we shelved her during the presentation portion and one girl was so nervous she didn't want to get up lest she risk public enpukenation.

I also get a kick out of Manuel's hand-written speech notes which I'm sure he's thrilled to know I still have (for some unknown reason).  Now keep in mind this was the same notorious bad speller that had "Milk and Cereal" (a.k.a. Mike and Cheryl) working together in the Student Elections.  I love where he writes that every sensory experience the main character has in the story can be tied to some "tramatic and tourcherous" experience in his past.  Money.    

Despite bad nerves and comically poor spelling, the Dave n' Manuel show went off without a hitch and we did well.  I'd confronted and conquered another major fear!

Even though Manuel's appearances in that class became increasingly rare, I went just because I loved the books.  I was getting academic credit for reading  Wells, Orwell, Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein, Aldiss, Ellison, Ballard, Herbert, Spinrad and Gibson.  I was making out like a bandito!

To this day I can still cite George Orwell's "1984" as my favorite novel and I consider it to be more topical today then when it was first published in 1949.

My final mark was in the vicinity of a B+ or A-, I can't remember which.

ENGLISH 406 - Renaissance Literature

Like Dean Larsen,  the reputation of the instructor proceeded her.  Professor Janet Baker was a ray of sunshine who taught us to relish art and culture amongst all the stuffy analysis.

A genial and soft-spoken lady in her forties at the time, Janet (and I call her Janet just because "Professor Baker" seems waaaaaay too staid for her) was genial, sweet, enthusiastic and knowledgeable.  If they made an action figure out of her, it would come complete with a short hair bob, colorful sweater vests and accessories like the King James version of the Bible (for all the wonderful examples of the iambic pentameter, natch!) and an oft-kind and helpful black pen.

Her untethered passion for Donne, Shakespeare, Bacon ("Mmmmmmm...Bacon"), Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Marlowe, and, er...Jonson was contagious.   She often gave students cool little cultural "brownie points" for doing brief and (mercifully) hand-written reports on things like attending a chorus of live medieval Christmas carols or catching Zeffirelli's "Hamlet" which featured her boyfriend at the time, Mel Gibson.


I'm telling you right now if Mel left his wife for Janet instead of some random Russian tart he would have been much better off.  SHE'D set his ass straight. 

Janet instilled in me a love of lyrical couplets and elegiac verse.  Even when I write what barely passes for poetry these days, it somehow always seems more legitimate to me when it rhymes.

I scored an easy "A" in this one.

ENGLISH 440 -  Theory and Practice of Criticism

If you read Part III you'll recall that I could barely remember anything about 440's pesky little brothers, 323 and 324.  I'm even foggier here.  Whereas those prerequisites redeemed themselves somewhat by allowing us students ample opportunity to completely crap on works we hated, I seem to recall 440 mainly concerned itself with studying writings about theory and reading one treatise after another by "respected" critics.

Yippie-ki-yay.

You know you're in trouble when the introductory notes are completely indecipherable, like watching an episode of "A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila" run backwards, upside down and in Swahili.

Try as I might I just couldn't to bring myself at that late stage to wade though countless tracts of boring philosophy.  As an example of what I'm talking about strap this little bit of Jacques Derrida on for size:

"Writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos."

Okay, can anyone tell me what the f#$% he's on about?   Seriously, anyone?  Little help?

But even this course taught me a valuable lesson: if you want people to read your s#!^, don't write like a pretentious twat.  I'm not saying that you should be embarrassed for having a vocabulary but the general rule is: take the clear and concise road versus dropping $5.00 words around like business cards.  

My contempt for this was often palpable in the papers I passed in.  Here are a few comments from my prof concerning a protocol we had to write applying impenetrable theory to the works of Wallace Stephens: "Funny when you keep 'theory' out of it, this is quite good, perceptive, sensitive and well written.  But 'theory' comes in piles of awkward phrasing and sheer misuse or misappropriation of the 'facts'.  You'll have to go through the readings many more times."


But how could I do that if I couldn't  even get through it once?   

He goes on to make some very telling remarks that speak volumes about how shy I still was: "I hope next semester you will become an active member of our seminars rather than the occasional visitor.  This paper shows you have valuable things to contribute.  The moral contract of a seminar is that you will."

But I didn't.  In spite of this I still crawled out from under the crush of 440 with a "B".

And with that my university days were over.

I remember two distinct thoughts that were paramount in my mind at the time.  One was coming to grips with the realization that I was academically (and financially) burnt out and mentally unable to move on to more education next year.  But I was also laboring under the truth that I wasn't done quite yet.  And if to you harbor any doubt to the veracity of that last claim, here's a l'il secret: I didn't even  go to my own graduation ceremony! 

Well, I appreciate the indulgence, Kind Reader.  You've listened to my residence and academic war stories with tremendous patience.   For the continuity freaks amongst you, you can now go back to my "Lowered Expectations" blog series and pick up the story thread right from there.

So why dedicate so much time and effort to talking about my studies?  Because I have to put the tales I'm telling about the "real working world" in context.   It's important to remind both myself and  potential readers that I was once one of those new, hyper-specialized, freshly-scrubbed go-getters that our universities continuously discharge every January and April like frightened Marines from the front of Higgins boat.   

Hopefully some of you will relate to these stories, take them heart and scare you straight if you feel like settling comfortably into a rut.

Stay tunes, folks.

I've only just begun... 

EPIC:


BONUS EPIC: http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=71819

FAIL: http://collegeskillset.com/the-5-worst-professors-youll-undoubtedly-suffer-through-in-college/

Skool Daze : Part III

Greetings and Salutations, Loyal Followers.

Needless to say, after living through the debacle detailed in my last entry, myself and a few trusted com padres shifted into a beautiful old Victorian house in the south end.  The rent was an ungodly $1200.00 a month but split amongst five other suck...er, housemates, the pain was assuaged considerably.  I'm confident that our monthly rent likely paid for the owner's intended flippage as well as the pretty, decorative historic certification plaque that I now see affixed to the front of the house when I drive by it.

Even somewhat dilapidated at the time, the house had real character.  In order for me to procure my own humble cell, I agreed to move into what I now realize was a drafty, stucco-covered broom closet.  But, like my first room in residence, I really didn't mind.  All I needed to do was cover the window with my "Rising Sun" Japanese flag, hang up a few posters of Sherilyn Fenn (I'd still hadn't learned my lesson even at this advanced stage) and fire up some righteous tunes and I was instantly at home.

The basement was cool in a "Silence of the Lambs" sorta way.  It was completely unfinished with an inexplicable pit in the middle of the floor which the owner had dug for some odd reason.  A part of me was expecting to wake up any morning naked at the bottom this fissure next to a bucket filled with St. Ives body lotion, the poodle-encumbered owner standing above me demanding that "It puts the lotion on it's skin!!!" 

The kitchen in that house spoiled me completely on any future galley-style apartment offerings I've been forced to use since.  Old brown flagstones, a sizable mobile island and a huge dining room area insured that despite the amount of people living there, cabin fever wouldn't be an issue.  I still remember cooking one of my first off-campus meals in that space.  A buddy of mine came into the kitchen one evening and saw me pouring gobs of vegetable oil into a T-Fal frying pan.

"What the f#@%  are you doing?"

"Cookin' hamburgers," I replied merrily, adding more oil to the several millimeters deep pool already present.

"What are you gonna do, deep fry 'em?" he chuckled.

I stopped my diligent efforts for a moment and turned to him.

"Whattaya mean?"

"There's enough fat in those hamburgers to fry them without adding more oil.  If you cook them in all that grease you're gonna give yourself a coronary."

He started to walk away and I looked at my handiwork thus far.  Just before he left the room I shouted:

"Yeah, well...d'uh!  I knew that!  And if you knew anything about cooking you'd know that I was just, uh, y'know...seasoning the pan." 

He stopped dead in his tracks, spun around and rebutted:

"It's a non-stick pan, you retard."

I was pretty pissed at him at the time but in retrospect he probably added years to my life that day.

We had the space and the tranquility to study in own domiciles now.  Before, if you wanted to read a book or write a paper you invariably had to leave the floor and go to the library since having a room on campus is the equivalent of a dog standing in the middle of a circle of people who all all crashing cymbals wearing pants made entirely out of "Beggin' Strips". 

It was a damn good sight that the house afforded relative solitude and freedom to concentrate.  I was going to need it.  The course load I'd taken on was to be the most challenging yet.  Here's the academic shotgun I was staring down:

ENGLISH 323 : Practical Criticism

The course that proves the old adage: "opinions are like a**holes, everybody's got one."  Taken directly from the "St. Mary's University Department of English Handbook" from 1993, the course description reads: "The intention of this course is to train students of English in discrimination."   Wow, I know those were less politically correct times, but that's ridiculous!  Oh, wait, there's more: "to train students of English in discrimination in reading and the formation of judgments at first hand, by examining some kinds of good and bad literary experience."  Man, am I ever glad I looked that up because I couldn't remember a damned thing about this course.  Having said that, it's likely the reason that I currently have over two hundred and fifty movie reviews on "Facebook".  I don't know if that's something to be proud of or just confirmation that I've got waaaaay too much time on my hands.

I'm actually being unduly harsh on ole' 323 here.  As I examine my notes and papers from the class it actually looked kinda fun.  For example we would have to read two poems and turn a critical mind to proving that one was superior over the other.  This often resulted in me savaging what I considered to be the lesser of the two works.  Bitchy comments like "the content of poem 'B' is trivial when compared to Herbert's 'Virtue' (and) lines like 'The smiles of Joy, the tears of Woe/Deceitful shine, deceitful flow' gives the poem an inappropriate lyrical quality that reminds one of a commercial jingle."

I then piled on by lambasting a series of images in the poem "that are more confusing then enlightening" and go on to assault "a plethora of cliched images in the final lines."  I bring down the critical hammer blow with the final, damning rant: "poem 'B' immediately hits the reader with everything there is to say, then proceeds...to move in a degenerative order away from the theme by offering only emotional oaths and vapid imagery."

Gadzooks, I was like the Rex Reed of the poetry set!

The second part of the course was considerably more boring, mainly because we jettisoned the practice of our criticism in favor of studying already-established theory from famous philosophers and critics.  When the prof's introductory notes included the refreshing yet intimidating admission: "The experience of teaching this course...taught me that students find the material challenging and sometimes frustrating, because of it's difficulty" you know you're in for a real treat.

My final marks was around an A+ and B- respectively.

ENGLISH 404 : Chaucer & the 14'th Century 

I loved this friggin' course.  It dealt primarily with the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, as written in the original Middle English.  Now, at face value, this might sound more tedious than watching someone play video game  golf, but I assure you, it was not.  The first four weeks of the course was spent putting the Canterbury Tales into it's cheeky, naughty context and there was not a dull moment to be had.  In fact, the Tales are rife with betrayal, drunkenness, infidelity, humiliation, slapstick humor, rivalry, tragedy, and bad taste.

So, essentially it's a Medieval version of "Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami".

The prof was a magnetic gent names Dr. Cyril Byrne.  He was a stocky fellow in his fifties with a pleasing, measured voice that he used to great effect in reading the cantor of Middle English.  He even managed to make the frequently pervy bits sound classy, like this brief snippet from the bawdy "Wife of Bath's" tale:

And why in all the books is it said
That the husband must pay his wife in bed?
And what should he use for the payment
If he doesn't use his privy instrument? . . .  

"Heh, heh.  Uh...heh, heh, heh. She said 'privy instrument'.  Heh, heh."

On rainy and windy days when he'd be running slightly late, Byrnes would often bomb into the classroom beet-faced, wearing a heavy Aran sweater with his ample trouser legs barely tucked into galoshes as an afterthought.  His hair was thinning and the tuft protruding from the front of his pate seemed almost self-aware.  During lectures when he's become particularly animated, the tuft would seem to come alive as well, detaching itself from the front of his head to move independently and point at students who made the mistake of looking away for a second.  He's dutifully smooth it back in place but eventually it would break free from his flypaper forehead and start singling people out again.  It was eerie.  

Professor Byrne took great pains to point out just how salty Chaucer's works were.  It taught me a very valuable lesson early on: art doesn't need to be highbrow and wanton pretension can sometimes be death.  Shakespeare knew this as well.  Both of these literary titans were often more interested in amusing the groundlings then heads of state because they knew in the end they'd end up reaching more people that way.

Professor Byrne was nothing if not thorough in his quest to to highlight Medieval naughtiness.  I remember when I first started working at Sears a customer wanted me to send their order to the "Quinte Mall" in Belleville, Ontario.  I almost lost it during the call, curtesy of Professor Byrne's detailed description of what part of the female anatomy Chaucer was describing when he used the word "Queynte."

I might as well have sent the package to "Prepuce Plaza".

Anyway, he considered the general line of my analysis of Canterbury's characters to "work well" and regarded my  examination of the "Wife of Bath" very favorably, describing it as a "very well researched and decently written paper".  

Sl-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-m!!!!!

I finished up with an A-.


ENGLISH 444 & 446 - Shakespeare's Comedies and Tragedies

This wasn't my first introduction to Shakespeare.  Waaaay back in Grade Nine or so we'd covered "Romeo & Juliet", which completely fascinated me.  The alpha and omega references, magical language, uncompromising resolution and laser-sharp commentaries on human nature were all mind-blowing  to me.  It was like nothing I'd encountered in my life up to that point.  The fact that Shakespeare composed these works hundreds of years ago and they were just as fresh today as when they were written is no small feat and it taught me about the immortality of artists. 

Now I couldn't admit it liking it at the time for fear of being blacklisted.  Er, more blacklisted than normal I mean.  Some of the knuckle-draggers in the class had taken to calling it "Fag-eo and Fag-iet" and made it clear that anyone who expressed an affinity for such things was clearly  a freak.  It's memories like this that make me wish I could go back in time with just a fragment of the confidence and conviction I posses now.  I'd soon tell these organ donors to shove their small-minded, homophobic thoughts where Paddy stuck the dough ball.

For the record I have no idea what that means, I just remember that when I was a kid sometimes I'd hear my Mom say "I felt like telling him to stick it where Paddy stuck the dough ball" whenever she was pissed off at someone.

I'm sure it's not dirty or anything...

Anyway, given my vested interest and previous familiarity with the Bard I thought I'd cruise through these classes.  But I didn't quite click with the prof.  Which was another interesting thing about university: sometimes, despite a uniform application of effort and producing papers from the same head space that gave you an instant "A" in any other class, occasionally you'd fail to have a meeting of the minds with a prof.  Sometimes they were predisposed to you and sometimes hey weren't.  Occasionally if your first effort wasn't up to snuff it might "typecast" you for the entire year, especially if the prof was particularly uncommunicative.

And that's the way it was with these classes.  All of my quizzes were marked 23 or 24 out of 30.  My papers were always returned with monosyllabic and totally unhelpful feedback like: "Good." 

Regardless of my final "B" grade, I loved covering Shakespearean plays like "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Tempest", "Hamlet" and my all-time fav "MacDeath", er..."Macbeth". 

Good times.

ENGLISH 416 -  The Romantic Movement

Prosecuted by the regrettably named "Dr. Seaman", this class would also prove to be one of my best.  It gave me a chance to study the works of some of my beloved poets such as Blake ("The Tiger", "The Sick Rose"), Coleridge ("Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Kubla Khan"), Shelley ("Ozymandias") and also some not-so-favorites.

I never really dug Wordsworth very much.  My opinion of Wordsworth is best exemplified in this exchange from a "Monty Python" skit:

Inspector: Morning, madam, I've come to read your poet.
Woman: Oh yes, he's in the cupboard under the stairs.
Inspector: What is it, a Swinburne? Shelley?
Woman: No, it's a Wordsworth.
Inspector: Oh, bloody daffodils. 

Because of my relative lack of interest in some of these poets, my quiz marks suffered a bit.  I managed to bounce back considerably when I delivered a top-notch term paper about symbolism in "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Looking at the essay now is hilarious.  The comments seem to be written by the professor in spite of himself. Over the course of twenty-three pages the infrequent, conservative-looking check marks begin to grow in size and frequency.  On the last two pages the margins become awash with what amounts to an appraisal orgasm.

"This is most interesting!" he notes at one point,  going on to add "This is very good!" and the nicely back-handed "Is it really your own?"  After scribbling an excited-looking "Excellent!" he proceeds to write: "Wonderful conclusion!  A very thorough and, I must say, energetic review of some very boring material, turned to good account.  You persist to the end and draw the same conclusion.  Earned your A+!"

As if realizing too late that he's gushed like a soccer mom at a "Twilight" red carpet event, he hastily adds: "The paper isn't really that good, but it is such a relief to discover somebody who can think on their feet, that I can't give you a high enough mark!"    

Wow, way to make a guy feel special. 

I ended up with an A- in this one.

ENGLISH 418 - 19'th Century Novel   

The professor, Dr. Perkin, was a relatively young, bespectacled, pasty fellow with a side-sweep hairstyle, who was typically clad in the standard issue prof uniform of hunter green sports coat replete with elbow patches.  Despite his wilting countenance and mannered demeanor he was possessed of a wickedly sharp and understated sense for humor.  In the very first class he announced the following to the huge gathering of students:

"I'm about to illustrate the required reading list to the best of my abilities.  If you don't think you can cope with it you may want to consider transferring out of this class immediately."

From some unseen reservoir beneath his desk, Perkin began to produce one Penguin Classic novel after another, stacking one atop the other in front of him.  Just as he obscured his own face behind the growing pile of books you could actually hear the collective sound of about twenty chairs pushing back as a slew of students jumped up, fled from the classroom and made a beeline for the Registrar's Office.

This class ran hot and cold for me.  For every "Pride and Prejudice" with it's still-relevant criticism of social order and iron clad gender-roles there was a "Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour" (which was about as exciting as it sounds).

For every tragic and bleak diatribe about the human condition exhibited in "The Mayor of Casterbridge"  there was a draggy epic like "Vanity Fair", which I'm sure worked fine as a serial but as a self-contained, nine-hundred page novel it was just death.  I really felt that it made it's point within the first two-hundred pages then proceeded to beat that theme to death over the next seven hundred, all the while making in-jokes about some contemporary source of ridicule that no modern reader would have any concept of.  

For every "David Copperfield" which attacked the venerable institutions of education and family there was an "Ivanhoe" which wallowed in anal-retentive descriptive minutia.  It wasn't enough for Sir Walter Scott to write: "the knight rode around the corner on his black stallion".  Noooooo!  We had to get an itemized description of what the knight was wearing from head to toe!  And just when you made it though this without slipping into a coma, Scott proceeds to describe what the friggin' horse is wearing in OCD-levels of detail!  I often (sometimes unfairly) wrote off some of these works as gratuitous examples of  "research masturbation" when I grew bored with it.

But even studying what I thought were flawed works taught me the importance of being sparse with description (to give the audience a chance to visually interpret their own customized version of the story) and how critical it was to keep references general to the human experience.  I soon realized that these tenants go to great lengths to keep works relevant, even after hundreds of years.

My final mark was in the B+ range.

ENGLISH 424 - 20'th Century American Literature   

This was one of the unexpected highlights of my year.  Up to this time I'd been told many times by elitist outsiders that taking English at St. Mary's didn't make sense, given the school's reputation as a Commerce school.  But one of the big perks about attending a university with a comparatively small and intimate English department was that you quickly learned to navigate the academic minefield and avoid the bad professors.

And the opposite was also true.  At the time, Dr. Michael Larsen, the professor for this course was also the acting Dean of Arts.  I was told by countless people that if you could take a class with him lecturing, you were in for a treat.

I was not to be disappointed.

The copious amount of notes I took for this class speaks volumes about how important humor can me in effective communication.  Here are some of Larsen's finest quotes:

• "Thanks...I always wanted one of these," Larson on a newly discovered meter stick in the classroom.
• "Okay, people!  Anton Chekov, he played hockey for who?"
• "Has anyone here taken a science?  A natural science?  Like witchcraft?"
• "Okay, next week we start 'A Farewell To Arms', which is widely regarded as perhaps the most famous literary work about leprosy."
• "Yeah, I don't care so much if your essay is a day or two late.  Papers are like wine, they age with time."
• "Well, as you all know the book of 'Exodus' in the Bible is about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt to Truro, Nova Scotia for that big shopping mall experience."

Needless to say the man commanded constant attention.

Thanks to this class I developed a life-long love for early American literature.  I got a chance to read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Faulkner and also added poets like T.S. Elliot and E.E. Cummings to my pantheon of heroes.

I fared well under Larsen's unconventional tutelage.  My papers came back with replies than ran the gamut of a modest "Good work!" to a sweetly polite and earnest: "An interesting and well-written essay.  I really enjoyed reading it."

I know it's all relative but I can only imagine some of the crap these people have to wade through from mentally threadbare students every year.  Even something that's reasonably coherent or semi-conscious must a be a real treat.  

This one was an easy "A" for me.

And, oh yeah, since I figured "when in Rome" I took one commerce course in Marketing that year just to see how the other three-fourths of the university lived.

I hated ever second of it.  It was as boring as watching paint dry.  Old-school, extra-fumy, long-drying paint in a terrible color like puce. 

I think I finished up with a "B".  Despite how supposedly practical this innocent little elective was, a truth dawned on me as I wrote the final exam in the Tower surrounded by hundreds of students all wearing pastel colored polo shirts and deck shoes.

There were hundreds of potential competitors all sweating profusely around me.  I had an epiphany that upon graduation I would need to compete with all of them for that prestigious job of managing a KFC outlet.

If I was to stand out amongst all the sheep in that room I would either need to distinguish myself with exemplary marks or exhibit an inordinate amount of passion for business.

I was in possession of neither of those two qualities.

And that's when the doggie-door sized  entrance to my Commerce career mercifully swung shut.

EPIC:


FAIL:  http://www.funniestcollegeessays.com/

And here's this week's comic.  It's an older one so the art is pretty crude.  I'm going to try and scan all future comics and doctor them a bit in Photoshop before I post them, so until then, please be kind...